They politely asked me about myself, using the slow, enunciated French that everyone seemed to have been told in advance to use with Americans. I found to my dismay that even making casual conversation was surprisingly difficult, and several times my attempted word or phrase was met with a subtle but unmistakable look of confusion. Nicole made a gracious attempt to cover my ineptitude by telling her brother and his wife how I had been away with the other Americans for two days and how tired I must be.
Later back at the house, Nicole assured me that it would get better. She’d had students with her before and she’d seen their progress. I hoped she was right.
We’d been placed in grammar classes, and I’d been put in a lower group than Sophie, Lindsay, and Adam.
“Oh, well,” Lindsay said, seeming to appear at my elbow just as I was tracing the remedial list and locating my name, “you’re lucky, really. I think our class is going to be super hard.”
I refrained from making a snide remark about how not all of us went to Swiss boarding schools.
“Anyway,” Sophie said, sensing my embarrassment, “you don’t learn French from a grammar class. We’re going to learn French from all of the fabulous friends we’ll make here.”
“Club de conversation starts soon!” Adam reminded us. The institute was bringing in local university students to meet with us and practice French and English in a casual setting, using the main room of the institute one evening a week.
After a couple of reschedulings due to illness, unspecified “personal matters” of Madame Rochet, and a bus-driver strike, the club at last began. Mercifully there was wine, which Adam, Sophie, and I availed ourselves of right away. We were each assigned a partner—English-speaking if one was French-speaking and vice versa. The class was led by Madame Rochet.
“Now, my children,” she said, holding her hands out to each side as though preparing to receive us collectively in an embrace, “you may speak to your companion about whatever you like. Doesn’t matter what. Your families, your studies, sports, interests. Whatever pleases you. Off you go.”
My companion was a pretty, dark-haired French girl named Véronique. She spoke in a slow, melodious voice and smiled brightly at me whenever I managed to produce a complete question or observation. The source of her enthusiasm for English turned out to be a year that she had spent in California, which had left her bewitched by America. She was longing to go back; she was an actress and planned to spend a short time in Paris studying theater at the Sorbonne before moving to Los Angeles. I told her I thought California had nothing on Paris, which she pleasantly, laughingly disagreed with, and after all, I’d only seen the train station in Paris. But California was her Paris. It pained me to think of what a place like Los Angeles might do to Véronique, and I shuddered to think of her spray-tanned and siliconed. But maybe she would have some innate Gallic resistance to these forces.
Every so often I stole a glance at Sophie, facing off with an enraptured-looking young Frenchman with closely cropped hair and bulging, round, brown eyes that gave him the appearance of an eager woodland creature.
After the hour was up, I reconvened with Sophie and Adam by the wine, and we discussed what to do with the rest of our evening. Adam had a blind date with a university student whom he met online, and we were admonishing him to send us an SMS afterward to let us know he was safe. We’d quickly become fond of sending each other these on the little prepaid cell phones from Orange that we took everywhere with us. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that several of the boys crowded around Véronique as soon as our time was up. They must know each other from the university, I thought. Adam excused himself to use the restroom.
The moment we were alone, Véronique materialized by our side.
“Excuse me, girls?”
“Hi,” I said, then introduced her to Sophie. They both nodded and smiled at each other.
“Listen, girls, I am having some friends over tonight to my apartment. Thomas and Mathis will be there,” Véronique said, gesturing with her shoulder in the direction of Sophie’s conversation partner and another tall, round-cheeked, blond male student, “and some other people from school. It will be very small, but I would love for you to meet our friends. Will you come? Pour pratiquer le français, non? ”
“Of course.”
“Yes,” Sophie and I answered simultaneously, trying to contain our enthusiasm at having been invited to someone’s apartment. After all, we’d been warned that this would likely not happen, that young people in France often had the same social circles from childhood on and that they might not be especially keen to add anyone new. I had assumed this was doubly true for Americans.
“Let us just tell our friend where we’re going,” I said.
“Perfect,” Véronique said, “come find us after.”
Sophie and I looked at each other with frank amazement; we imagined ourselves epic in the pantheon of students who had gone abroad throughout time. Look at us, I thought, making it seem so easy. Amazingly it didn’t seem to be only Sophie who had gotten us in the door; after all, it was my conversation partner who had done the inviting.
Véronique returned to the boys, who appeared to be waiting eagerly for her report, and whose faces lit up when she delivered it. Mathis’s smile was small and nonchalant, but Thomas was beaming. He believes he has a chance with Sophie, I thought, and perhaps he did. Not that he was in Sophie’s league, but then, who was? He was not bad looking, I supposed. And it didn’t hurt that he was French, which gave him the allure of seeming remote and intriguing. A Frenchman would feel like a conquest, even though it was well-known that they were more than willing to sleep with American girls. One of a great host of contradictions: that Americans girls were thought to be easy because of our endemic national friendliness, when truthfully we were generally more prudish about sex than the French.
What it came down to, I thought, as Sophie and I watched Adam walking back toward us, was that no matter what else was at play here, the French had the upper hand in the situation: we were on their turf.
“Adam, we’re hanging out with French people tonight, aren’t you proud?”
“Mais oui! Did you girls pick someone up in a bar this week that I didn’t know about?”
“Actually it was the two of us who got picked up,” I said, “by our new friend Véronique.”
Adam looked over and, when he saw that Véronique was looking in our direction, gave her a little wave. “I think perhaps that had something to with les mecs there.”
Sophie laughed and I just nodded.
Véronique’s apartment was above a café and Laundromat just on the other side of the centre-ville. The small one-bedroom had red wallpaper and gilt mirrors on the walls alongside re-creations of vintage film posters. It should have been garish but somehow wasn’t. The only furniture was a little couch and chairs that looked just shabby enough to be well loved and between them a solid, black lacquer hutch that served as the coffee table. A television set on a stand was placed inconspicuously in the corner. I hadn’t watched television since I’d been in France; it seemed intimidating, and unlike when I spoke to real people, it made no concessions to my helplessness. I missed it so little that I lamented the hours I had spent with it all my life, the hours I would surely spend with it in the future. To be without it gave my life in France a cultural purity.
For a short time it was only the five of us, and Véronique dominated the conversation with her questions and reminiscences about California. Do you surf ? she wanted to know. Do you skateboard? She had learned to do these things while abroad and seemed disappointed that neither of us counted them as hobbies. She talked about the wide streets and the palm trees, the tan, smiling faces. She was so unexpectedly warm that I became momentarily suspicious of her; had she secretly been assigned by the institute to befriend us? Certainly someone from our country had laid some important groundwork with her that we were now benefiting from. My guess was that she must have met a guy there.
Before long others began to arrive and Véronique’s apartment filled up with people. Thomas used the burgeoning crowd to position himself next to Sophie, and I could hear him peppering her with questions: What did she think of France? What was she studying at home? Her French sounded so fluid and perfect that I felt suddenly alone in the room as the only American who couldn’t pass. You have only a tiny accent, Thomas said to her, c’est charmant. He leaned in when he talked to her, eyes wide with frank interest and attraction that no American guy I’d met would have the courage for since, back home, something far less than this would be considered way too much.
Véronique was a wonderful hostess, introducing me to everyone she spoke with and presenting my Americanness as something special, and indeed her friends—too chic to all be students, I decided—reacted in kind.
“Ah, vous êtes Américaines? Génial!”
After a couple of glasses of wine I relaxed. I was falling into the sweet spot of these conversations, the divine intersection of alcohol and foreign language where just enough drink meant that my tongue was loosened and those words and phrases I knew came easily, but not so much that my thinking and speech were generally impaired, in which case my French would go right out the window. The trick now was to maintain this level and neither sober up nor get much drunker. Watching those around me drink more or less like adults, it struck me anew how differently the French students seemed to feel about alcohol than Americans. It was not at all like back home, where the general idea was to get as much in the bloodstream as quickly as possible, in pursuit of which we chugged vile things at parties like jungle juice, a mixture of cheap synthetic fruit juices and grain alcohol.
Wandering off in search of a bathroom, I suddenly felt shy passing through the crowd without my new dear friend and guide. People stared openly at me, not in a way that felt hostile, just interested. I was under the impression that the group around me was tight-knit and that Sophie’s and my faces were something of a shock, though hopefully a pleasant one.
I checked myself out in the small gilt mirror that hung above the scalloped edge of the sink. The bathroom was pretty and spotless, if a bit overtly feminine for my taste with its frilly hand towels and small porcelain angels on the narrow windowsill. The bathtub was the odd type I had seen several times now, with a long shower hose. The lighting was soft, and for this I was grateful, as it had been many hours since I’d applied my makeup and I most likely didn’t look as good as the wine would have me believe. I wiped away the eyeliner that had pooled in the corners of my eyes.
I exited and carefully closed the door behind me. As I turned around to head back to Véronique, I nearly collided with someone.
“Pardon,” I exclaimed, proud of myself for speaking French even when taken by surprise.
“No, no,” the man said, “it was my fault. I startled you.” Tall and dark haired, he had a smile that seemed to burst from his face and white, but not too white, teeth. He seemed relaxed, and a glaze of color lit his skin as though he had just returned from a vacation. “And then, no harm done,” he said, holding aloft two glasses of wine, both still full. After what appeared to be a split second’s consideration, he handed one of them to me.
“Oh, but . . .” I looked at him quizzically. Had he been walking around the party looking for someone he wanted to talk to, armed with an extra glass in case he should find the person without a drink?
He shrugged. “It was for my friend Serge, but I think he can fend for himself.” This was even better, I thought; he hadn’t been just wandering around, he was on his way elsewhere and had changed his direction. His eyes flickered over me. “You must be one of Véronique’s Americans.”
“Is my accent that bad?”
He chuckled. “No, no. Your accent is fine, chérie. We simply don’t see that many new faces around here and you look American.”
This didn’t seem likely to be a compliment and I made a sour face at him. He laughed again. It thrilled me that I amused him.
“This is not an insult. It’s the perfect teeth”—he drew back his lips to reveal his own, which looked no less than perfect themselves—“and the shiny hair.” He reached out and lifted a strand that hung over my shoulder. With someone else I might have bristled at this overly intimate gesture, but I could feel myself subtly leaning into his touch. I nervously took a sip of wine.
The seconds passed rapidly while a silence opened up around us. I feared if I said nothing, he would walk away, and yet I felt frozen. Abruptly he laughed, and I blushed as though he’d been reading my thoughts.
“Don’t tell me I have somehow offended you already, ma jolie Américaine. What a terrible ambassador I am.”
“No!” I said, too quickly this time, too emphatically. “It’s okay.” My French, so fluid moments ago, was threatening suddenly to abandon me completely. “How do you know Véronique?”
“Elle est ma cousine, we’ve been close since we were très petits. In fact I have not really gotten to talk to Véronique yet tonight. She was engaged in some very deep discussion with someone when I came in, but maybe we should go and see if she has emerged from it, no?”
I felt a wash of disappointment that we would lose the intimacy of this corner so soon, but as I felt myself floundering with the language, Véronique—with her patient enunciation and, if necessary, her English—could only be a help. After all, I would still be near him. Him. I realized I still didn’t know his name. I wanted to ask him before we joined the others, but he had turned his back to me and reached out behind him, his hand blindly finding mine and grasping it to lead me through the crowd. I didn’t even need to know his name. I wished we had a long corridor or an expansive room to cross hand in hand and not simply the ten feet or so of the living room of this small apartment.
When she saw us, Véronique squealed with delight and jumped up from the couch where she’d been chatting with a girl who was perched on the armrest and deposited four kisses on his cheeks. Four! A number I had heard rumor of but had not before witnessed.
“Alex!” she said. Alex. He released my hand to put his arms around her and I wished he would hold it again. But why would he do that? I reminded myself that we didn’t even know each other.
“Brooke,” Véronique said, “I see you have already met my darling Alex.”
“Yes,” Alex answered for me, “we have already become good friends. She was quite horrified that I knew she was American without her telling me so.”
“Oh, but you must not be, chérie!” Véronique admonished.
“Véronique loves Americans, as I’m sure you have already discovered.”
She scowled at him and turned around suddenly as though she’d forgotten something important on the couch.
“And you?” I said quietly. Such a simple question, yet it felt so bold given the circumstances.
“I am not generally predisposed either way,” he said, his tone unreadable, or at least unreadable to me, focused as I was on deciphering his French and distracted as I was by his eyes, his voice, all of him. “So it is you as well who must be a good ambassador.”
“Voilà,” Véronique said as Sophie appeared by her side, “the other.” Véronique had not made quite such a point of introducing us as a pair to any of the other guests who had woven through our conversations saying their hellos. Alex was clearly important to her.
“Bonjour, je m’appelle Sophie.” She had taken to saying her name as the French did, with a swift emphasis on the last syllable. I watched Alex’s face for a reaction, for the momentarily stunned look that I had come to expect would pass over a man’s features upon first meeting her. But he betrayed nothing, had just the same cool smile.
“What a lovely accent you have,” Alex said, “how charming.”
“Alex lives in Paris most of the time, but he’s come home to Nantes to take care of his grandmother,” Véronique explained. “And where have you been before this, Alex? With this tan?”
“To the house in Cap Ferrat. The weather was unusuall
y warm for this time of year. My family has a charming little house down south,” he explained to Sophie and me. “We must all go there sometime.”
Was this casual invitation something that could actually materialize? It seemed so far-fetched. How had we been so lucky to meet Véronique and Alex on the same day? I was sick with the desire to make them like me. Taking advantage of my not facing Alex directly, I studied his face. I had never met anyone our age so self-assured; he seemed settled into himself. I wanted to ask how old he was but could not see a way to do so casually.
“Is your grandmother ill?” Sophie asked.
“Sadly, she has some quite advanced dementia. My mother is not coping very well, I’m afraid”—he smiled slightly when he said this—“so I’ve come back to help for a little while. I can do my work here, so it’s not really a problem.”
“What sort of work do you do?” I asked.
“I’m a photographer.” Alex held his hands up in front of him to pantomime a camera.
“Come sit,” Véronique instructed us. Sophie and I settled back into the plush couch as Véronique wended her way through the crowd to fetch glasses and another bottle of wine. Shrugging off his elegant olive-green coat, Alex sat next to me, the complete length of his thigh pressed tightly against mine in the compact space.
“How is your mother?” Véronique asked when she returned.
“Fretting and smoking all day long, drinking too much in the evening, not eating enough. Generally playing the victim.” His harsh words made me tense up, and I wondered if he had felt me do so. He took another sip of wine before turning to Sophie and me. “It’s complicated with my family.”
Losing the Light Page 6